More on anonymous “donation.” In today’s Salon, “Baby Daddy or Not” asks advice columnist Cary Tennis if she and her partner, who are going for donor insemination, should use an anonymous contributor. Partner wants a faceless nameless dad, the writer wonders if they should use a known donor. The question of identity, unsuprisedly, doesn’t play. “Baby Daddy,” instead, is concerned about the need of the proposed child (especially if it turns out to be a boy) to have a “father” involved his/her life. She weirdly wonders that she may be suffering from “internalized homophobia” “that we need a man to raise a child.” Cary says, yeah, it would be nice to have a dad around, sure, but then gets to the heart of the issue: All I know is what I would want. I would not want to know that I came from an anonymous sperm donor. I would want to know that I came from somebody. I would want to know who he is. I would want my birth to be acknowledged and celebrated by all parties responsible. If some man’s sperm were responsible for me, I would want that man to be able to look at me with Continue Reading →

Nail meet hammer! Two weeks ago the Detroit News published a remarkable series of articles, “Empty Arms/Empty Hearts,” on the social management of the unwed pregnant during the baby snatch era. Reporter Marney Rich Keenan relied heavily on the narratives of Detroit-area women much as Ann Fessler did nationally in The Girls Who Went Away. You can access the entire series from this point, and then hit the various links on the right to read all. Reponses to the series appeared in the News on December 27. They are not nice. Except for 2 letters, one from a snatchered nmom Susan Schnirring and the other from CUB’s Region 3 Director, Mary Ross, the letters charge Keenan and The News with pushing….you guessed it…abortion! So what if abortion has nothing to do with the women featured in the article? Can we expect any less from chattering anti-abortion busybodies who view every mention of “adoption” as an awesome opportunity to exploit their pet bete noir; any criticism of how it operates as “anti-adoption”? Bastardette, of course, should have seen it coming. Having misspent 2 weeks of her youth each summer luxuriating on the beach at Gratiot Inn on Lake Huron, however, I Continue Reading →

Just in time for the new year! Tuesday (January 2) Bastardette will be a guest on Talking About Adoption hosted by Donna Montalbano broadcast on WSAR 1480 AM, Fall River, Massachusetts. The subject, of course, will be the Massachusetts records access fiasco. Jack Sweeley, a member of the MARTA Executive Committee will join her for what promises to be a rousing critique of SB 2690–the bill that makes some adoptees more equal than others. WSAR isn’t broadcast on the ‘net, but you call in questions–or email them. Call-in: 508-673-1480 Email: [email protected] Speaking of Adoption is the only New England radio program exclusively devoted to adoption issues. Veteran broadcast host Donna Montalbano brings on the experts every week to inform and enlighten her listeners about the world of adoption.

For your weekend reading pleasure check out BB Church’s new blog: The Triad is a Five-Legged Stool. For a long time now, Bastardette, rather inarticulately and not often enough, has argued that the adoption “triad” is a lie–a semantic weapon created by the adoption industry to separate, segregate, manipulate, and control the people most effected by its machinations: Us. The industry’s “triad” is our “triad.” Just how Good Adopteeing can we get? How else can we explain the easy acceptance of “implied promises,” “protective” legislation, and the eternal AdoptionLand pissing wars? As long as we let industry-constructed language define us, we loose. While Bastardette blathers, BB articulates. In just a few hundred words BB Church deconstructs the Holy Adoption “Triad,” our relationship to the industry and the state, and shows that language does matter. The political implications are evident. This is important stuff. Anyone interested in taking control of the discourse and up-ending the bureaucrats, social engineers, and thugs in the lobby, needs to read this. And use it.

December 29, 2006 RE: SB 2690: records access for selected adoptees. Please Veto! Dear Governor Romney: Massachusetts Access Rights to All (MARTA) asks you to veto SB 2690. This bill creates an unfair, discriminatory tiered system in which adopted persons born in Massachusetts on or before July 17, 1974 and on or after January 1, 2008 can receive copies of their unaltered original birth certificates. Adoptees born between those dates, will not be allowed to receive their original birth certificates except by petitioning the court. The precursor bill to SB 2690 was SB 959. The intent of that bill was to restore the right of birth record access to all Massachusetts-born adoptees without restriction, no matter when they were born or adopted. SB 2690, the amended version of that bill now on your desk, guts that original intent. It denies to thousands of Massachusetts adoptees, based solely on their date of birth, the natural right of identity and the legal right to access to their own birth certificates. MARTA believes that all people born in Massachusetts should be able to receive a truthful copy of the state record of their birth regardless of their adoptive status. We believe that the Continue Reading →

December 29, 2006 His Excellency Mitt Romney, GovernorState House, Room 360Boston, MA 02133 The Honorable Governor Romney: Bastard Nation: The Adoptee Rights Organization, the largest adoptee rights organization in North America, urges you to veto SB 2690 because it establishes an unacceptable tiered system for adoptees to obtain their original birth certificates. Instead of trying to treat all adopted adults equally, this bill creates different layers of adopted adults. Why? (1) Adopted persons 18 years of age or older born in the commonwealth on or before July 17, 1974 or on or after January 1, 2008 or an adoptive parent of an adopted person under 18 years of age and born in the commonwealth on or after January 1, 2008 will be “allowed” unrestricted access to the original birth certificate. (2) Adopted persons born in Massachusetts between those dates cannot access their original birth certificates without a court order as under current law. This just doesn’t make any sense (3) The bill also establishes a voluntary state-operated “contact information registry”–an apparent sop to blackholers, who will be forced to enroll in a government program with the hope that an original birth certificate might be forthcoming if their birthmother consents. Bastard Continue Reading →

BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT! MASSACHUSETTS SB 2690 Please forward freely MASSACHUSETTS TRASHES ADOPTEE RIGHTS! LEGISLATION CREATES TIERED SYSTEM OF IDENTITY RIGHTS BASED ON DATE OF BIRTH! BLACKHOLES THE MIDDLE! SB 2690 (formerly SB 959) passed the Massachusetts legislature on December 26. It will hit Governor Mitt Romney’s desk for his signature in the next few days. Call or fax Governor Romney IMMEDIATELY and urge him to VETO SB 2690. (Contact information below) A little over a year ago SB 959, a bill that restored the right of unrestricted access to the original birth certificate to all Massachusetts adoptees, had the overwhelming support of members of the Joint Committee on Families and Children who called it a “no brainer.” After a favorable hearing, in which some committee members literally told the National Council of Adoption’s Lee Allen during his opposition testimony to shut up, the committee went silent. The bill, with the support of certain “adoption reformers” was amended repeatedly and quietly, until the right of all Massachusetts adoptees to receive their birth record was reduced to a favor for some. The bill number was changed twice, and the newest version, as late as the first week of December, was not Continue Reading →

It seems to me I’ve heard that song beforeIt’s from an old familiar scoreI know it well, that melody…….Jules Styne, Sammy Cahn Yesterday’s Washington Post features two articles on anonymous donor insemination that cut to the heart of the “choice” Melissa Etheridge and Tammy Lynn Michaels made to erase half of their twin’s heritage for their own convenience. The articles are way too long to paste in here, but I’m posting excerpts. My remarks follow them. In My Father was an Anonymous Sperm Donor 18-year old Katrina Clark writes about growing up as a self-described “freak” and the search for her donor: I was angry at the idea that where donor conception is concerned, everyone focuses on the “parents” — the adults who can make choices about their own lives. The recipient gets sympathy for wanting to have a child. The donor gets a guarantee of anonymity and absolution from any responsibility for the offspring of his “donation.” As long as these adults are happy, then donor conception is a success, right? Not so. The children born of these transactions are people, too. Those of us in the first documented generation of donor babies — conceived in the late 1980s Continue Reading →

Call for Proposals Encountering New Worlds of Adoption:2nd International Conference on Adoption and CultureProposal deadline: March 1, 2007 Organized by the Alliance for the Study of Adoption, Identity, and Kinship Conference Organizer: Marianne Novy (University of Pittsburgh) SAVE THE DATE: Conference Date: October 11-14, 2007Is adoption today remaking the face of the family? Is it redefining parenthood? How can literary critics, philosophers,anthropologists, historians, sociologists, legal scholars, political scientists, culture studies scholars, and others give perspectives to current adoption issues such as identity, esp. transracial and transnational, family, socioeonomic and/or international inequalities, openness, kinship, loss, and commodification? Papers should discuss representations of adoption (this could include representations of birthparents) in literature, film, and other arts, and/or interactions between adoption practices and culture(s) in fields such as those listed. Keynote speakers will be: Susan Bordo, Professor of English, University of Kentucky, author of Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture,and the Body; Emily Prager, author of Wuhu Diary: On Taking my Adopted Daughter Back to Her Hometown in China; Dorothy Roberts, Professor of Law at Northwestern University, author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty and Shattered Bonds: the Color of Child Welfare. Also expected are Jill Deans, Sara Continue Reading →